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An interview with Dave White, a water expert at Arizona State University, about what a breakthrough along the Colorado River really means
Arizona, California, and Nevada announced a deal on Monday to reduce the amount of Colorado River water they use, ahead of a bigger overhaul planned for 2026. The agreement is crucial, likely keeping the river from reaching dangerously low levels that would have put water supplies for major cities and agricultural regions at risk. But Colorado River water policy is often knotty and confusing, and it can be difficult to wrap one’s head around just what kind of impact deals like this can have.
To that end, I called up Dave White, the director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University and chair of the City of Phoenix’s Water/Wastewater Rate Advisory Committee. He explained how things work now, what the deal means, and how he’d like to see things change in the future — particularly in 2026, when the current set of water allocation rules expire and are replaced. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
There are more than 100 years of law policy agreements, which we collectively call the law of the river. But the most relevant is an agreement called the 2007 Interim Operating Guidelines for the Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. That’s the long name, but we typically call it the 2007 agreement.
That agreement created a set of rules that, as the name indicates, helped to guide the operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead. And along with subsequent agreements, particularly the drought contingency plans in 2019, it has guided the management of the reservoir system on the Colorado River and set forth the allocations managing the flow to the lower basin states.
Right now we’re in the time period between when the interim guidelines were established in 2007, updated with drought contingency plans in 2019, and when we’ll hit a deadline for a new set of operating guidelines in 2026. And so all of this is trying to manage the risk from the reduced water supply on the Colorado River and to help reestablish a balance in the supply-demand equation of water in an era of megadrought, climate change, and high agricultural demand and increasing municipal demand.
The first thing that’s important for folks to realize is that this is a proposal. What was announced was essentially an agreement among the lower basin states — California, Nevada and Arizona — to propose a plan to reduce demand in those states. It will need to go through additional steps to identify more specifics, and then this proposal ultimately will need to be adopted by the seven affected states and then endorsed by the Bureau of Reclamation.
What the proposal does is lay out a framework to reduce water demand in the lower basin by about 3 million acre feet. And for context, one acre foot is about 325,000 gallons of water, or the amount of water used by two to four homes in the western United States per year. That reduction would be taken across multiple sectors: agriculture, tribal communities, and some municipal or urban users, most notably the Metropolitan Water District of California, which is the Los Angeles area.
The idea is to reduce demand through voluntary conservation. And then part of the package is compensation for some of that voluntary conservation in the form of funding from the federal government through the Inflation Reduction Act to the tune of about $1.2 billion. That is an absolutely critical part of the of the story: the Inflation Reduction Act has really enabled this breakthrough, because of the federal funding for those voluntary conservation measures.
Another critical part of the story was that recently the Bureau of Reclamation released what’s called a draft environmental impact statement, and it presented a couple of alternatives to the states for consideration. Those proposals gave us kind of a federal government’s perspective on the framework moving forward. It was essentially a classic negotiating tactic, where the Bureau of Reclamation said, “look, you states have yet to reach a consensus agreement, so we’re going to lay out a plan,” and, as is often the case, everybody was unhappy with parts of that plan.
That helped to stimulate additional negotiations and bring California, in particular, more to the table. So it’s a very important moment in time because it represents a turning point in multi-year negotiations between the states. Importantly, it lays out a path forward for a consensus agreement that is driven by the states as opposed to being imposed upon them by the federal government. So, we’re talking about a breakthrough in negotiations that led to a three-state proposal.
Well, that’s what we’re waiting to see. We don’t have all of those details yet.
Legally, the Bureau of Reclamation needs to go through this process, weigh the different alternatives, evaluate it, identify what they would call a preferred alternative, and then ultimately make a determination. But the Bureau of Reclamation has certainly indicated there’s initial support for this proposal and that the funding would be made available.
We don’t know who specifically would receive how much of that funding but we do know that it will be agriculturalists (essentially farmers and ranchers), some municipalities such as the Metropolitan Water District of California, and some Native American communities.
We are still engaged in what I would call incremental adaptation. This is adapting to the rapidly changing conditions that are presented by this 22-year-long drought, the so-called megadrought in the region. We are also adapting to the impacts of climate change. If you go back, you know, the 2007 agreement was an incremental update to deal with a very significant risk of shortage on the Colorado River system in 2000 to 2005. We had the drought contingency planning process in 2019 that was another incremental adaptation at that time that was meant to get us to 2026, when the current guidelines expire. Environmental conditions continue to rapidly change, while the demand side continues to stay high. And while we’ve made a number of efficiency gains and voluntary reductions, the river is simply over-allocated for the flow that we have seen, especially since the turn of the millennium.
So we’ve been engaging in a series of incremental adaptations. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a very smart strategy as you move along, right? You’re incrementally adapting your policy to reflect the changing environmental and social conditions. This is another important incremental adaptation that will hopefully allow us to keep working towards the 2026 guidelines.
What I and many others argue is that we need a more transformative adaptation, we need a more significant restructuring. Now, it’s difficult to do that right now in the midst of a very short-term risk. But eventually, between now and 2026, we need to address some of the structural imbalance, or deficit, in the river. We have over-allocated the river in this era of increasing drought and climate change.
We’ve got to restructure the demand over the course of the next several years, and that’s going to require more transformational kinds of changes. But I also want to point out that’s not limited to reducing demand, right? You can do that through dramatic increases in efficiency. We can produce the same units of product, whether that be food or microchips or homes or businesses, with significantly less water.
The most effective strategy is efficiency. It’s the cheapest. It does not require significantly new infrastructure or new water augmentation. And there are lots of good stories out there, in creating more efficiencies and creating more flexible policies and more adaptability within the way that we manage water. We’ve got to sort of wring every cool new approach we can out of the system.
One that I think is really important is that the city of Phoenix and several of its regional partners in central Arizona are in the planning stages of moving towards an advanced water-purification process. What that means is it would allow the cities to pool their wastewater resources, their effluent, and then be able to treat that water through advanced water purification so we can reuse that water for municipal use. We call that direct, potable reuse of the water.
Central Arizona is incredibly efficient, we reuse about 90% of all the wastewater that we produce in the central Arizona region for power production, for urban irrigation, for agriculture, etc. But we can actually reuse that water to support households and businesses. We can then use that water again. Some of it is consumed by people, but basically cycling the water through the city as many times as possible reduces the need for new raw water.
So the current proposal that’s in the process of being developed by the City of Phoenix Water Services Department is for advanced water purification that, according to the current estimates, would produce about 60,000 gallons of water a day for City of Phoenix residents from wastewater. And so, that’s one way we can be much more efficient in recycling and reusing our water.
I do think it gets to the need for greater public understanding and then, you know, individual and collective action. In single family residential households, for example, 50% or more, on average, of the water use is outside the home for things like residential landscaping and swimming pools. In the Phoenix area, we’ve seen a really significant trend in reducing water demand inside single family homes, thanks to technologies like low water-use toilets and more efficient washing machines and dishwashers and so on. The next frontier is getting more progressive with the way we manage residential landscaping water. And that's something that every individual household can do.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority, the Las Vegas Regional Authority, has been really at the forefront of these kinds of strategies with turf buyback programs, incentivizing homeowners, and creating all sorts of both incentives and policies to reduce that outdoor residential demand. And that’s something where individual households can be empowered.
No, I really don’t. It’s about a sort of risk management in the short term, and then crafting new policy approaches and new management strategies over the long term. So I don’t think these get in the way of each other. The 2019 agreement essentially bought us some time, and this round of proposals and anticipated agreements will continue to buy us some time.
Do I think we need more adaptation, and more significant changes? Absolutely. But I would never criticize these incremental plans, because they’re absolutely necessary to manage short-term risk.
Without these actions, there was a plausible scenario where levels in the reservoirs could drop below the minimum power pool, meaning we wouldn’t be able to create power out of the Hoover Dam. In [the Bureau of Reclamation’s] 24-month studies, we began to see scenarios in which the lake levels dropped below the intakes, meaning we wouldn’t be able to deliver Colorado River water whatsoever to the states.
When you start to see these highly undesirable scenarios where you lose the ability to produce power, you potentially even lose the ability to deliver any water at all from the Colorado system to Arizona, California, or Nevada, you know you’ve got to act and engage in short-term risk management.
The risk that we’ve always seen is that you get some relief from the kind of very strong winter precipitation in the Rocky Mountains and in California that we had this year. But as a colleague says, we cannot let one good winter take the pressure off. I never want to root against good news, and the winter precipitation and the new proposal and potential agreements are good news. But you got to keep the pressure on and keep the emphasis on the long-term strategies.
[Laughs] Yes.
Well, I think you can look at it both ways. Yes, there was the intention that the 2019 plans would get us to 2026. Turns out the 2019 plans got us through 2022. That’s just the reality we’re in. Do I wish the 2019 plans would have gotten us to 2026? Yes. But without the 2019 plans, we would have been at risk of minimum power pool levels even earlier.
I was hopeful the 2007 plans would get us to 2026. But the reality is that the climate is changing, the drought has just been incredibly persistent. I mean, we now know from looking at reconstructions of the past climate that this 22-year period is the driest period in our region in the last 800 years for certain, and very likely in the last 1,200 years. That’s an exceptional period of drought. And so, by some measures, you know, it’s pretty remarkable what the water management community has done to manage the risk without significant disruption to the region. So in some ways, it’s a success story.
The single most important thing everyone recognizes is that we really need to chart a new path forward for agriculture. Particularly for agriculture in the lower basin, and even more specifically for non-food forage crops in the lower basin.
We still use two-thirds or more of our water in the lower basin for agriculture, and most of that is used for forage crops, like alfalfa, which feed livestock. So we very much need to restructure the agricultural sector in the lower basin and think about prioritization of certain types of agriculture in certain locations. And importantly, we need to work with agricultural communities, with landowners and businesses, to help them transition to a future that recognizes there’s less water available. And, you know, this is the challenge that we face: How do we make an intentional, thoughtful, supportive transition to a new, more efficient, and more appropriate type of agriculture in the West?
This region is in an amazing region to grow alfalfa if you have water. And so, there’s lots of rational choices that were made along the way. But in an era of significantly reduced water availability, it is simply not sustainable for us to continue to use that much of our available water for agriculture, and in particular for forage crops mostly to support cattle. And so this has to change.
I fully recognize, though, that these are private property rights, and there needs to be a process for this. We can’t just simply have a situation like what we saw in the Midwest where we just move all of our manufacturing overseas and abandon entire swaths of the country. We have to think about how we can help, whether it’s through compensation, community planning, capacity building, job transitions, etc. But that’s the biggest part of the solution. We need to be very thoughtful about that.
I think one of the key things we really need to get into the planning process [for 2026] is greater adaptability and greater flexibility so we’re able to respond to changing conditions. Under the current guidelines there is a priority rights process where we would have [hypothetically] seen the reduction of essentially all — 100% — of Arizona’s allocation of the Colorado River, before any of California’s rights were reduced. But it seems implausible to eliminate the Colorado River water supply to Phoenix, which is the fifth largest city in the country. These are the third rails of water politics. We have to rethink the way that these water allocation decisions are made, and we’ve got to be much more flexible, much more adaptable, and really think about how we can respond to climate and water conditions.
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On the IEA’s latest report, flooding in LA, and Bill Gates’ bad news
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms tomorrow could spawn tornadoes in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama • A massive wildfire on a biodiverse island in the Indian Ocean has been burning for nearly a month, threatening wildlife • Tropical Cyclone Zelia has made landfall in Western Australia with winds up to 180mph.
Bill Gates’ climate tech advocacy organization has told its partners that it will slash its grantmaking budget this year, dealing a blow to climate-focused policy and advocacy groups that relied on the Microsoft founder, Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has learned. Breakthrough Energy, the umbrella organization for Gates’ various climate-focused programs, alerted many nonprofit grantees earlier this month that it would not be renewing its support for them. This pullback will not affect Breakthrough’s $3.5 billion climate-focused venture capital arm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which funds an extensive portfolio of climate tech companies. Breakthrough’s fellowship program, which provides early-stage climate tech leaders with funding and assistance, will also remain intact, a spokesperson confirmed. They would not comment on whether this change will lead to layoffs at Breakthrough Energy.
“Breakthrough Energy made up a relatively small share — perhaps 1% — of climate philanthropy worldwide,” Brigham writes. “But what has made Breakthrough Energy distinctive is its support for policy and advocacy groups that promote a wide range of technological solutions, including nuclear energy and direct air capture, to fight climate change.”
Anti-wind activists have joined with well-connected figures in conservative legal and energy circles to privately lobby the Trump administration to undo permitting decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to documents obtained by Heatmap’s Jael Holzman. Representatives of conservative think tanks and legal nonprofits — including the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dated February 11 requesting that the Trump administration “immediately revoke” letters from NOAA to 11 offshore wind projects authorizing “incidental takes,” a term of regulatory art referencing accidental and permissible deaths under federal endangered species and mammal protection laws. The letter also requested “an immediate cession of construction” at four offshore wind projects with federal approvals that have begun construction: Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Vineyard Wind 1, and Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects.
“This letter represents a new stage of Trump’s war on offshore wind,” Holzman writes. “Yes, he has frozen leasing, along with most permitting activity and even public meetings related to pending projects. But the president's executive order targeting offshore wind opened the door to rescinding leases and previous permits. Doing so would produce new, costly legal battles for developers and for publicly-regulated utilities, ratepayers. Over the past few weeks, offshore wind developers with projects that got their permits under Biden have sought to reassure investors that at least they’ll be fine. If this new request is heeded, that calm will subside.”
Heavy downpours triggered flooding and debris flows across Los Angeles County yesterday. A portion of the Pacific Coast Highway, one of the most iconic roadways in America, is closed indefinitely due to mudslides near Malibu, an area devastated in last month’s fires. Duke’s Malibu, a famous oceanfront restaurant along the PCH, was inundated. The worst of the rain has passed now and many flood alerts have been canceled, but the cleanup has just begun.
Rain flows down a street outside a burned home.Mario Tama/Getty Images
Global electricity use is set to rise by 4% annually through 2027, “the equivalent of adding an amount greater than Japan’s annual electricity consumption every year,” according to the International Energy Agency’s new Electricity 2025 report. Here are some key points:
IEA
JPMorgan Chase clients have apparently been demanding more guidance about the climate crisis. As a result, the bank launched a new climate report authored by its global head of climate advisory, Sarah Kapnick, an atmospheric and oceanic scientist who was previously chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report seeks to build what Kapnick is calling “climate intuition” – the ability to use science to assess and make strategic investment decisions about the shifting climate. “Success in the New Climate Era hinges on our ability to integrate climate considerations into daily decision-making,” Kapnick writes. “Those who adapt will lead, while others risk falling behind.” Here’s a snippet from the report, to give you a sense of the tone and takeaways:
“Adhering to temperatures below 1.5C will require emissions reductions. Depending on your definition of 1.5C, they may require historic annual reductions and potentially carbon removal. Conversely, if you have a technical or financial view that carbon dioxide removal will not scale, you should assume there is a difficult path to 1.5C (i.e. emissions reductions to zero depending on your definition in 6, 15, or 30+ years). If that is the case, you need to plan for the physical manifestations of climate change and social responses that will ensue if your investment horizons are longer.”
Greenhouse gas leaks from supermarket refrigerators are estimated to create as much pollution each year as burning more than 30 million tons of coal.
Grantees told Heatmap they were informed that Bill Gates’ climate funding organization would not renew its support.
Bill Gates’ climate tech advocacy organization has told its partners that it will slash its grantmaking budget this year, dealing a blow to climate-focused policy and advocacy groups that relied on the Microsoft founder, Heatmap has learned.
Breakthrough Energy, the umbrella organization for Gates’ various climate-focused programs, alerted many nonprofit grantees earlier this month that it would not be renewing its support for them. This pullback will not affect Breakthrough’s $3.5 billion climate-focused venture capital arm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which funds an extensive portfolio of climate tech companies. Breakthrough’s fellowship program, which provides early-stage climate tech leaders with funding and assistance, will also remain intact, a spokesperson confirmed. They would not comment on whether this change will lead to layoffs at Breakthrough Energy.
“Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy remain as committed as ever to using our voice and resources to advocate for the energy innovations needed to address climate change,” the Breakthrough spokesperson told me in a written statement. “We continue to believe that innovation in energy is essential for achieving global climate goals and securing a prosperous, sustainable world for future generations.”
Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 to help develop and deploy technologies that would help the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The organization made more than $96 million in grants in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.
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Among its beneficiaries was the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based think tank that promotes technological solutions to climate change. (Despite having a similar name, it is not affiliatedwith Breakthrough Energy.) Last week, a representative from Breakthrough Energy told the institute’s executive director, Ted Nordhaus, that its funding would not be renewed. The Breakthrough Institute had previously received a two-year grant of about $1.2 million per year, which wrapped up this month.
“What we were told is that they are ceasing all of their climate grantmaking — zeroed out immediately after the USAID shutdown because Bill wants to refocus all of his grantmaking efforts on global health,” Nordhaus told me on Monday, referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to defund the United States Agency for International Development. “But it’s very clear that this wasn’t brought on solely by USAID. I had heard from several people that there was a big reassessment going on for a couple of months.”
The Breakthrough spokesperson disputed this characterization, and denied that cutbacks were due to the USAID shutdown or a shift in funding from climate to global health initiatives. The spokesperson also told me that some grantmaking budget remains, though they would not reveal how much.
As for Breakthrough Institute, the funding cut will primarily impact its agricultural program, which received about 90% of its budget from Breakthrough Energy. Nordhaus is trying to figure out how to keep that program afloat, while the institute’s other three areas of policy focus — energy and climate, nuclear innovation, and energy and development — remain largely unaffected.
Multiple other organizations confirmed to Heatmap that they also will not receive future grants from Breakthrough Energy. A representative for the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment, a trade organization for sustainability professionals, told me that Breakthrough had recently informed the group that it would not renew a $400,000 grant, which is set to wrap up this May. (ACLCA’s spokesperson also noted that the grant had not come with any indication that it would be renewed.) Another former grantee told me that while their organization is currently wrapping up a grant with Breakthrough and does not have anything in the works with them for this year, they expected that future funding would be impacted, though they did not explain why.
Breakthrough Energy made up a relatively small share — perhaps 1% — of climate philanthropy worldwide. Foundations and individuals around the world gave a total of $9 billion to $15 billion to climate causes in 2023, according to an analysis from the Climateworks Foundation.
But what has made Breakthrough Energy distinctive is its support for policy and advocacy groups that promote a wide range of technological solutions, including nuclear energy and direct air capture, to fight climate change.
“Their presence will be missed,” said the CEO of another climate nonprofit who was notified by Breakthrough that its funding would not be renewed. Breakthrough Energy “was one of the few funders supporting pragmatic research and advocacy work that pushed at neglected areas such as the need for zero-carbon firm power and accelerated energy innovation,” they added.
"Even if it’s a drop in the bucket, it still makes a difference,” another former grantee with a particularly large budget told me. This organization recently sent Breakthrough an inquiry about partnering up again and is waiting to hear back. “But for small organizations, it’s make it or break it.”
Speculation abounds as to the rationale behind Breakthrough’s funding cuts. “I have heard that one of the reasons that Bill decided to stop funding climate was that he concluded that there was so much money in climate that his money really wasn’t that important,” Nordhaus told me. But that is not true when it comes to agriculture, he said, which comprises about 12% of global emissions. ”There’s very little money for advocating for agriculture innovation to address the climate impacts of the ag sector,” Nordhaus told me.
Gates, who privately donated to a nonprofit affiliated with the Harris campaign in 2024 but did not endorse the Democrat, dined with Trump and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, for more than three hours at Mar-a-Lago around New Year’s Day, he told Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker. He said that Trump was interested in the possibility of eradicating polio or developing an HIV vaccine. “I felt like he was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation,” he told her, days before the inauguration.
Since then, Trump’s war on USAID has frozen funding to a polio eradication program and shut down the phase 1 clinical trial of an HIV vaccine in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda.
The Trump administration is now being lobbied to nix offshore wind projects already under construction.
Anti-wind activists have joined with well-connected figures in conservative legal and energy circles to privately lobby the Trump administration to undo permitting decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, according to documents obtained by Heatmap.
Representatives of conservative think tanks and legal nonprofits — including the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Heartland Institute and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT — sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum dated February 11 requesting that the Trump administration “immediately revoke” letters from NOAA to 11 offshore wind projects authorizing “incidental takes,” a term of regulatory art referencing accidental and permissible harassment, injury, or potential deaths under federal endangered species and mammal protection laws. The letter lays out a number of perceived issues with how those approvals have historically been issued for offshore wind companies and claims the government has improperly analyzed the cumulative effects of adding offshore wind to the ocean’s existing industrialization. NOAA oversees marine species protection.
The letter also requested “an immediate cession of construction” at four offshore wind projects with federal approvals that have begun construction: Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia offshore wind project, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners’ Vineyard Wind 1, and Ørsted’s Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind projects.
“It is with a sense of real urgency we write you today,” the letter states, referencing Trump’s executive order targeting the offshore wind industry to ask that he go further. “[E]leven projects have already received approvals with four of those under construction. Leasing and permitting will be reviewed for these approved projects but may take time.”
I obtained the letter from Paul Kamenar, a longtime attorney in conservative legal circles currently with the D.C.-based National Legal and Policy Center, who told me the letter had been sent to the department this week. Kamenar is one of multiple attorneys involved in a lawsuit filed last year by Heartland and CFACT challenging permits for Dominion’s Coastal Virginia project over alleged potential impacts to the endangered North Atlantic right whale. We reported earlier this week that the government signaled in proceedings for that case it will review approvals for Coastal Virginia, the first indication that previous permits issued for offshore wind could be vulnerable to the Trump effect.
Kamenar described the request to Burgum as “a coalition letter,” and told me that “the new secretary there is sympathetic” to their complaints about offshore wind permits. “We’re hoping that this letter will basically reverse the letter[s] of authorizations, or have the agency go back,” Kamenar said, adding a message for Dominion and other developers implicated by the letter: “Just because the company has the approval doesn’t mean it’s all systems go.”
The Interior Department does not directly oversee NOAA – that’s the Commerce Department. But it does control the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which ultimately regulates all offshore wind development and issues final approvals.
Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.
Some signees of the document are part of a constellation of influential figures in the anti-renewables movement whose voices have been magnified in the new administration.
One of the letter’s two lead signatories is David Stevenson, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute, an organization involved in legal battles against offshore wind projects under development in the Mid-Atlantic. The Institute says on its website it is a member of the State Policy Network, a broad constellation of think tanks, legal advocacy groups, and nonprofits.
Multiple activists who signed onto the letter work with the Save Right Whales Coalition, a network of local organizations and activists. Coalition members have appeared with Republican lawmakers at field hearings and rallies over the past few years attacking offshore wind. They became especially influential in GOP politics after being featured in a film by outspoken renewables critic and famous liberal-turned-conservative Michael Shellenberger, who is himself involved in the Coalition. His film, Thrown to the Wind, blew up in right-wing media circles because it claimed to correlate whale deaths with offshore wind development.
When asked if the Coalition was formally involved in this request of the administration, Lisa Linowes, a co-founder of the Coalition, replied in an email: “The Coalition was not a signer of the request.”
One cosigner sure to turn heads: John Droz, a pioneer in the anti-wind activist movement who for years has given talks and offered roadmaps on how best to stop renewables projects.
The letter also includes an endorsement from Mandy Davis, who was involved with the draft anti-wind executive order we told you was sent to the Trump transition team before inauguration. CFACT also co-signed that draft order when it was transmitted to the transition team, according to correspondence reviewed by Heatmap.
Most of the signatories to the letter list their locations. Many of the individuals unrelated to bigger organizations list their locations as in Delaware or Maryland. Only a few signatories on the letter have locations in other states dealing with offshore wind projects.
On its face, this letter represents a new stage of Trump’s war on offshore wind.
Yes, he has frozen leasing, along with most permitting activity and even public meetings related to pending projects. But the president’s executive order targeting offshore wind opened the door to rescinding leases and previous permits. Doing so would produce new, costly legal battles for developers and for publicly-regulated utilities, ratepayers. Over the past few weeks, offshore wind developers with projects that got their permits under Biden have sought to reassure investors that at least they’ll be fine.
If this new request is heeded, that calm will subside.
Beyond that, reversing these authorizations could represent a scandal for scientific integrity at NOAA – or at least NOAA’s Fisheries division, the National Marine Fisheries Service. Heeding the letter’s requests would mean revisiting the findings of career scientists for what developers may argue are purely political reasons, or at minimum arbitrary ones.
This wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened under Trump. In 2020, I used public records to prove that plans by career NOAA Fisheries employees to protect endangered whales from oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic were watered down after a political review. At the time, Democratic Representative Jared Huffman — now the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee — told me that my reporting was evidence of potential scientific integrity issues at NOAA and represented “blatant scientific and environmental malpractice at the highest order.”
It’s worth emphasizing how much this mattered, not just for science but literally in court, as the decision to allow more seismic testing for oil under Trump was challenged at the time on the grounds that it was made arbitrarily.
Peter Corkeron, a former NOAA scientist with expertise researching the North Atlantic right whale, reviewed the letter to Burgum and told me in an email that essentially, the anti-offshore wind movement is exploiting similar arguments made by conservationists about issues with the federal government’s protection of the species to target this sector. The federal regulator has for many years faced the ire of conservation activists, who’ve said it does not go far enough to protect endangered species from more longstanding threats like fishing and vessel strikes.
If NOAA were to bow to this request, Corkeron wrote, he would interpret that as the agency’s failure to fully protect the species in good faith instead becoming “suborned by the hydrocarbon exploitation industry as a way of eliminating a competing form of energy production that should, in time, prove more beneficial for whales than what we’re currently doing.”
“The point on cumulative impacts is, on face value, fair,” he said. “The problem is its lack of context. Cumulative impacts on North Atlantic right whales from offshore wind are possible. However, in the context of the cumulative impacts of the shipping (vessel strike kills, noise pollution), and fishing (death, maiming, failure to breed) industries, they’ll be insignificant. Because NOAA has never clearly set out to address ways to offset other impacts while developing the offshore wind industry, these additive impacts place a burden on this new industry in ways that existing, and more damaging, industries don’t have to address.”
CFACT responded to a request for comment by sending me a press release with the letter attached that was not publicly available, and did not respond to the climate criticisms by press time. David Stevenson of the Caesar Rodney Institute sent me a statement criticizing offshore wind energy and questioning its ability to “lower global emissions.”
“The goal is to pause construction until everything is reviewed,” Stevenson said. When asked if there was an outcome where a review led to projects being built, he said no, calling offshore wind an “environmental wrecking ball.”
Well, we’ll soon find out what the real wrecking ball is.